What is deeper than respect and love? That’s what we felt: veneration.
I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you’re serious enough to practice.
So when we spend all of our time trying to separate that which is already joined, it’s a waste of time.
Love is the spiritual essence of what we do. Technique is the manifestation of the preparation and investment as a result of the love.
Through improvisation, jazz teaches you about yourself. And through swing, it teaches you that other people are individuals too. It teaches you how to coordinate with them.
The people are not coming because of me. They didn’t come before me. It’s because of a lack of education and understanding, so it makes me more motivated. It’s like my mother said about having an artistic child – she learned more from him and he gets more attention and more of the love, not less.
You don’t try to duplicate certain things that other cats do, because you could never do it as well as they do. Nobody can get on that tenor saxophone and play like Trane, because he’s the only one who can spell out chords and sound good when he does it.
Jazz is democracy in music.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance.
Jazz is not the kind of music you are going to learn to play in three or four years or that you can just get because you have some talent for music.
Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness – these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids.
It’s really not a stretch. The checks and balances are the same. The drums are the executive branch. The jazz orchestra is the legislative branch. Logic and reason are like jazz solos. The bass player is the judicial branch. One our greatest ever is Milt Hinton, and his nickname is “The Judge.”
The musicians, Duke Ellington, his thing was not about separating himself from the rest of America. Louis Armstrong – go to the forefathers of our music – Jelly Roll Morton – they’re not preaching a separatist agenda. They’re not taking their music and saying, “This is for me.”
It’s our job to just do as much as we can to enlighten the people about it and to represent it by playing it with some integrity. That’s what I try to do.
Flexibility is an essential part of Jazz. It’s what gives Jazz music the ability to combine with all other types of music and not lose its identity.
Certain music, jazz in particular, has the ability to make you a better citizen of the world. It helps you expand your world view and gives you more confidence in your cultural achievements. Improvisational jazz teaches you about yourself while the swing in jazz teaches you how to work with others.
The arts shows that you’re civilized, and it makes life sweet. So you can exist and you can buy more things and you can be more – we’re dealing with a form of commercialism that obscures a prior relationship to quality, and it’s a national problem.
Everything comes out in blues music: joy, pain, struggle. Blues is affirmation with absolute elegance. It’s about a man and a woman. So the pain and the struggle in the blues is that universal pain that comes from having your heart broken. Most blues songs are not about social statements.
People have taken time out of their day and spent their money to come sit down at a concert. And it’s jazz music-it’s not easy for them to get to it. I don’t want them ever to feel that I’m taking their presence lightly.
Jazz music is the power of now.